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The next time you hear someone say the Occupy Wall Street movement was interesting but is losing steam and that all its participants do is protest and demonstrate rather than take positive action, don’t believe it.

For the most part, the national media stopped covering Occupy Wall Street when images of protesters became too mundane to make the nightly news—not enough sensationalism.

Critics say the movement is doomed to a slow decline because its proponents have turned their backs on participation in the traditional political process. But looking at the corruption of the big banks and the rigged financial system that brought down the economy, a group of people in sympathy and synchronicity with the Occupy movement decided to push for a new way of doing financial business: use a public-banking model that can eviscerate the power of the few big financial institutions that now control a great deal of state and municipal wealth.

When Ellen Hodgson Brown came to Marin in December 2010, she delivered a presentation that described how California could create a state bank. Brown is the president and chairman of the Public Banking Institute (PBI). “Once you grasp the principle here” it seems like a natural solution to the economic crunch, she said at the meeting organized by Supervisor Susan Adams. “You have to understand that Wall Street is leveraging our money—and not to our benefit—lending it back to us. When you realize that we could do that in-house, keep it all local, leverage our money for our own purposes, when you understand that is the point here—why not do it?”